MSIT Partner Incentives

CLIENT: Microsoft

ROLE: UX Designer

Partner Incentives helps Microsoft partners recoup their
costs promoting and selling Microsoft software all over the
world. The existing tool was woefully out-of-date and a new
version was being developed to replace it. I led the design
of various features as we integrated a new UX team into the
organization.

Early view of a payments tool

Transitioning users to an entirely new platform is not
easy. The mandate had been given to create a new platform
to reduce the time and cost of processing PI claims. The
existing system was more of a mail box, whereby partners
submitted information regarding their claims for MS vendors
to piece together and approve. With the number of partner
claims increasing a new system was necessary sooner than
later.

The new Partner Incentive portal was ambitious in its
goals. The development had started prior to my introduction
to the team and after my arrival, some of its limitations
and cracks started to become apparent. Here are some of my
contributions to the project.

Duplicate Claims

As partners file claims, there is always a chance that some
will include the same proof/invoices invalidly on
additional claims resulting in an incorrect payment. To
prevent that we needed a method for our vendor partners to
determine if there were duplicates in our tool at the time
of validation.

I worked with the vendor team to identify pain points in
their existing process and developed iterative solutions
that I validated with them directly. This led me to develop
a solution that allowed the vendor to instantly run a query
on the claim in review against all open and previous
claims, instantly identifying possible duplicates for
review.

Responsibilities — User
Research, Interaction Design, Visual Design

Deliverables: — User flow,
Wireframes, Final art and assets

Fig. 1 - Claims validation user
flow

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not support the video tag.

Fig. 2 - Duplicate claim process
wire walkthrough

Fig. 3 - (left) Final version
(right) Corresponding wireframe view

Claim Filing

Early on, the program manager for Claims had communicated
that they were experiencing long turn times and delayed
payments to partners. The beta testers were having some
difficulties filing their claims with the new tool and
despite attentive claims support, we were not making
progress toward reaching our target goals month over month.

I had dug into the claim process early on through an
initial analysis of the claim form right after joining the
team. Through additional conversations with partners in the
beta and conducting my own extensive audit of every claim,
I determined the form had structural and presentation
issues that were contributing to our partners high turn
times.

I proposed that we consider modifying the experience and
built a web-based prototype to test my initial assumptions
from my research. Unfortunately priorities changed and I
didn't get the chance to get this in front of users to
build a case to move forward. The video below shows the
original and concept for context.

Responsibilities — User
Research, Interaction Design, Visual Design

Deliverables: — Wireframes, HTML
prototype

Fig. 4 - The main goals of the
prototype were to increase positive completions and
lower the turn time on approval. My strategy was to
slow them down and help them focus on the
questions. Accuracy is more valuable than speed in
their world.

Time Slider/Filtering

Our partners were expressing concern over the filtering
functions of the Claims Summary page. The period always
defaulted to the entire fiscal year, which most of the time
was not an accurate reflection of claims funds being
accumulated or reflecting the balance of those to try and
recoup. This ultimately led to submissions which were
either rejected or not paid in full because of insufficent
funds.

With such uncertainty, I developed a new IA and visual
design aligning it to our users needs, validating the
direction via submitted feedback and rolling user
interviews being conducted.

The preferred direction had to be pushed due to engineering
constraints as we moved out of beta. The final version
accomplishes the same goals of easily surfacing accurate
fund amounts based on their programs periods by simplifying
the methods of filtering. This led to higher partner
satisfaction and fewer support issues filed.